Holiday shoppers broke another record with 200.4 million consumers shopping from Thanksgiving Day to Cyber Monday, up more than 18 million year-over-year. After a soft start to 2023 due to economic concerns and low consumer confidence, many analysts lowered their revenue forecasts for advertising.
Cookie alternative inventory allows advertisers to reach under-targeted and often ignored consumers with greater efficiency. In the 33Across Q3 Programmatic Cookieless Trends Report, we saw that the top programmatic spenders, Retail and Finance advertisers, doubled their investment in cookie alternative inventory on the 33Across Exchange. With the third-party cookie’s deprecation beginning in 2024, we observed programmatic buying behaviors during the most lucrative and busiest time of the year.
Here’s what we observed during the 2023 Cyber Weekend:
11% |
Programmatic spending grew by 11% year-over-year across all inventory during Cyber Weekend |
13%
|
Retailers continued to invest in cookieless and spent 13% more on cookie alternative inventory than other advertising verticalsClothing, Electronics, eCommerce, and Home and Garden were the main contributors to this growth |
19%
|
Travel advertisers increased their programmatic buys on cookieless inventory by 19% during Cyber WeekendA major vacation rental company was one of the largest cookie alternative spenders |
3X |
Cookieless inventory had an average win rate of 13% while third-party cookies averaged 4% |
What’s Next for Advertisers
While shoppers showed up to get in on the deal action for Cyber Week deals, we observed that high ticket items like luxury and jewelry did not show the strong performance that we saw in 2022. Consumers are still price-conscious and economic constraints may affect the shopping season. The 2023 holiday buying season will be the last one with third-party cookies and we expect cookie alternative inventory to become the standard in 2024 and advertising purchase behaviors will have to adapt accordingly.
Contact us to learn more about how to secure your programmatic investment without third-party cookies.
